ABSTRACT
Apart from wanting to describe its creative moments, Richards had little interest in the poet's life. He lamented the hegemony of historical and biographical scholarship because it deflected attention from the work of art. Richards searched for biographical clues only to solve a textual problem, and then only rarely. This position, taken early and linked to the modernist rejection of selfexpression, never mellowed through Richards' life and in fact became more doctrinaire. He wished that Shelley might have written, instead of "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," "Poems are the unacknowledged legislation" in order to "take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet" and put it where it belongs, "on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity." 1 He wished for the "disappearance of all poets" and a "return to the anonymity" of the Homeric rhapsodes, ballad composers, and Old Testament prophets and historians.2 The Clark Lectures in 1974 and much of Richards' later work are peppered with objections and passages neatly summarized by a favorite quotation from Kipling: "Seek not to question aught beside I The books I leave behind."3 In his poem "The Ruins" he wrote "And words it is, not poets, make up poems," a line he inscribed on the fly-leaf of a copy of his collected poems in 1978. He refused either to write his own memoirs or to discuss the lives of the many poets he had known, from Hardy, Kipling, and Eliot to Empson, Lowell, and Wilbur.
